Crown and Cortes: government, institutions and representation in early-modern Castile (review)

Reviews 235 The conclusion explains the lasting nature of many of the social changes described in this work, though Thomas points out that the roots of these changes existed before 1154, and change did not cease in 1216. The bibliography lists a very large range of primary and secondary sources, making this work indispensable for anyone working on medieval Yorkshire. Anne Gilmour-Bryson Depertment of History University of Melbourne Thompson, I. A. A., Crown and Cortes: government, institutions and representation in early-modern Castile (Collected studies series, 427), Aldershot Variorum, 1993; cloth; pp. x, 341; R.R.P. £49.50. There are nine studies in this coUection. One, on the CouncU of War in the age of PhUip II,firstappeared in 1967, but remains an excellent introduction to atopicwhich Thompson took up on a much bigger scale in his War and government in Habsburg Spain 1560-1620 (1976). Six others appeared in the 1980s, another in 1990, and the last, co-authored with Pauline Croft, in 1992. Three from the late 1980s are here in English for thefirsttime. So this is work that is relatively new. Even so, Thompson modestiytellsus in his preface that to take account of the massive quantity of later work, the fourth study in this book, 'The government of Spain in the reign of Philip IV, published in a Spanish version in 1986, but completed in 1982, would have to be re-written. He is right Overviews can be especially susceptible to the aging process. But he is also right when he goes on to say that it still contains enough of value to justify its inclusion. All the studies in this volume are good value. There is something here for anyone who follows the debates on the origins of m o d e m bureaucracies, on the question of bow administration and government coped with, and were shaped by, the impact of war, on the dynamics and sociology of the Early M o d e m state, on royal absolutism, and on the problems of how far and under what circumstances authority at the centre could be transmuted into power at the local level. Thompson is owed a special debt for the four articles on the Cortes. It is not so long ago since historians dismissed the principal representative institution of Habsburg Castile as a rubber-stamp affair, especially after 1538, the last occasion on which the nobility and clergy were summoned to 236 Reviews attend it It was Thompson who did much of the pioneering work that has brought the Cortes out of the obscurity in which it deliberated, revealing the extraordinarily lively role that it played in questions of royal taxation and tbe complexrelationsbetween its deputies, the cities who sent them, and the Crown. The Cortes of Castile was not summoned after 1665, but that, according to Thompson, was due not to the Crown's contempt for it but rather to the goverment's recognition of its own weakness. Furthermore, both Crown and cities now shared an interest in dealing with tax matters directiy, instead of through a body that had made trouble for both. At the sametime,thefinalco-authored article makes a strong case for the view that tbe absence of the great nobUity did matter after aU, and had much to do with why the Castilian Cortes never achieved the prestige or the power of the seventeenth-century Parliament in England. G. B. Harrison School of Spanish and Latin-American Studies University of N e w South Wales Unlandt, Nico, ... E sifetz mantas bonas chansos ... techniques romanes dans le Minnesang allemand du treiziime siecle (Amsterdamer Publikationen zur Sprache und Literatur, Band 102), Amsterdam and Adanta, Rodopi, 1992; paper; pp. vi, 444; R.R.P. ? Unlandt's book seeks to examine the formal relationship between, on the one hand, Old Provencal and Old French lyric poetry and, on the other, Middle High German lyric poetry, and to explore the influence of the former on the latter. He is particularly interested in the German contrafactum of Romance poems. He has fed the structural details of an impressively large number of poems from the three languages into a computer and then used it to...